A timely word or two about food and nutrition. It is a long road for mammals from the first suck of the teat to the Last Supper. I daresay that the former is probably the superior meal of the two. Have you ever wondered what your last meal on this earth will be? No? Good, for if you had answered in the affirmative, you would have betrayed a morbid streak in your personality which would have marred your usual panache much like a bit of blackberry jam on your favourite distressed jeans.
Never before in the known history of mankind has there been an era, such as now, wherein we are carpet bombed with information about food and nutrition. Please bear in mind as you read, that I am not a credited paleo-nutritionist, nor am I a doctor. My credentials are my stomach, my mind and my senses.
It is popular among experts to churn out articles saying that we must eat this and that in these quantities with this frequency. It is experts who receive grants from the pharmaceutical arms of chemical combines, cartels and the five mega food producers. Many will remember the Five Food Groups children were forced to memorize in grade school and to indoctrinate their parents with? The choice of five groups was either shamelessly intentional or an incredible coincidence. Interestingly, the word expert comes to the English language from the Latin word, experiri, which means 'to try'.
Thus, since the word expert frames the notion of a guy just trying something out, I feel justified in putting myself in that august category. Many people who have put themselves and their families in debt for decades in order to receive instruction and accreditation in fields that narrow in scope the higher they go will usually do what ever the cheque writer bids them do. If they are paid, for example, to find out that coffee causes dilation of the nostrils, it will be found, using innocent rats, monkeys and people to do so.
Researchers may be also be tasked at another time to find out that another component of coffee is vitally essential to human nutrition. Behind these scenes, Agribusiness plays the commodity markets like a mandolin. When battered by real climate extremes or by the weather control technologies extant since the Seventies, the stock market of food can be tweaked for profit, loss, and for compliance.
It is popular in books by experts on the subjects of food and nutrition, to offer analogies of the antiquity of the earth and the infancy of homo sapiens, by comparison. Let us look in the direction this sends our thoughts. It immediately occurs to the clever, that given the foregoing, it is also absolutely true, that in terms of a single human lifetime, millions of years is a mighty long time.
Men and women are omnivores, which fact I deduced from the examination of my own teeth, before my favourite foods decimated their numbers. Humankind lived all over the earth and whether or not we all came streaming out of one valley in Africa is beside the point. In all the varied climates and terrains we occupied we ate whatever the heck we could dig up, catch, pick, pluck or grow. Sometimes there was a lot of this and sometimes a lot of that. Other times this ran out and that wasn't to be had for love nor cowrie shells. We obviously didn't die out. Remember that excepting the various ice ages, there was no refrigeration to speak of, that is, it was seasonal at best. Yet, we people remained.
Experts are also fond of theorizing about evolution. I enjoy this exercise as well, thus I put forth that we humans adapted to a variable food supply both in quantity, kind and quality. As some groups of people became settled for very long duration in particular regions, they may have physiologically adapted in some ways to a more constant and less varied food supply. Others not so much or not at all.
I also put forth that because of the variation in our evolutionary, dietary legacies, many of us are best suited to a come by chance diet. Once this group starts adding multivitamins and such, the trouble begins. One thing we know is that except for mutation, physiological change occurs very slowly. I posit that the relatively rapid changes in human food sources and availability, coupled with the paid for research about what we should eat, is the cause of much illness in the world today. Our bodies are simply not geared to having an abundance of everything.
Those are my current thoughts on the physical aspects of food. There is yet another aspect to food that is equally important. That is, the spiritual aspect of nutrition. Let's postulate that someone beats the tar out of you and then gives you a fresh hot cookie. In my case, that actually happened. I can tell you that you will derive no nutrition from that cookie. Why? Because of where your mind is at when you eat that particular cookie. If you steal a domestic animal of another human and cook it, the spiritual sustenance you will draw is not on par with the spiritual sustenance you would draw, had you raised that animal or had you hunted one of its wild cousins in the wild.
We bring a very real spiritual component into every bite of food we eat. If this concept is hard for you to grasp, try to imagine it. If I gave you a fine China plate and told you that the colourful vegetables upon it were hand-dug on hidden jungle plateaus by seven virgins at eleven thousand feet at midnight using jade trowels and cooked in crystal vessels with water that was ceremonially saved from the first rains of a thousand seasons by shape-shifting shark priests. Furthermore, that it was meant to be the food only of those who have been chosen to seek the white panther and that it was cool to go ahead and wash it down with a beer. You would likely consume it with gusto and be ready to square-dance with grizzly bears.
That, my friend, is the power of the placebo. This ethereal wonder is our human power. Use it when you eat and enjoy your food. If your mind is chock-full with idiot scribbles in the form of charts and graphs, you will not be able to imagine and to visualize that the tangerine you just had in your fruit-cocktail cup was the fruit of a young tree growing only a stone's throw from the very house where Ib'n Rashid portentously broke wind.
The very same tree whose branches he used to scale the city walls after returning from his self-imposed exile of more than forty years, due to the embarrassment he suffered when said wind was broken in the presence of his beloved betrothed. The identical tree that he now clings to, under her window, a late middle-aged and very worldly wise man, listening to the tinkle of silver cups and plates of hammered brass. Her dulcet voice hasn't changed except that it’s become even more ethereal. Wait! Her mother, her father and the Sharif are also at the table.
Ib'n leans in close as his love of loves speaks, “Everyone, remember the time Ib'n Rashid came to propose to me and farted?”
Their tempestuous laughter drives him away yet again. In this instance, to a land of lemons, olives, oregano and red mullet.
I conclude that if we consume our precious food with the literature of bar code labelling and such in our heads, we are already starving, dear friends. Bad cholesterol, white fat, good cholesterol, brown fat, gluten, amino-peptides and free radicals will never replace a Guatemalan truck-driver's breakfast of huevos machacados con tomates y pimientos del bosco, tortillas, frijoles negros con queso de cabra y zumo de lima, café negro con azúcar roja y un vaso de jugo de piña fresca; all cooked by an ancient woman on a mud stove and served by a young Quechua beauty in a hand-made quetzal-patterned dress and paid for with old silver coins.
Thus, let’s put something good in our heads to activate the nutrition of the food that we do eat. Avoid obvious offal. If you want a pet organ to care for and to worry about, how about the liver? Squeeze it out once a year with some dandelion root tea or something similar. Don't annoy it with things that make it work too hard. You know what those things are. Take care of the liver’s colleagues, the kidneys. Much of the food we have access to is full of all kinds of woe and for many people, is unavoidable. That is where the aforementioned organs come in to play. Keep your filters clean, hold on to the rope and ride the bull.
fin